How Happy to Be (11 page)

I’m shocked by this number. Are you telling me, Government, that 58 per cent of Canadians aren’t liquoring themselves up at least once a week? Are you saying the majority of Canadian women aren’t lubing the joints, warming the cockles, doing what they must to get through? Telling me that a chilly woman in Churchill, Manitoba, who sees polar bears waddle down Main Street, who glances around the shack and suddenly realizes she doesn’t know the whereabouts of her bite-sized baby boy – are you telling me this Canadian woman doesn’t hightail it to the liquor cabinet and suck back a wine cooler while she’s waiting for the police? Are you saying the skinny Quebec City art student in Olive Oyl footwear and negligible bangs, the girl who collects antique milk bottles and hasn’t eaten more than a bagel a day
for three years – are you telling me she doesn’t (when the roommates are at band practice, when the phone didn’t ring when it should have) – are you telling me she doesn’t carve an opening out of that box of Niagara-region gasoline-tinged Chardonnay her sonofabitch drummer ex-boyfriend left behind – are you telling me she doesn’t just drink that shit down like a hungry puppy at the teat?

I don’t buy it. People lie to the Government, because they think the Government lies to them.

(Except for Franny Baumgarten’s parents. Her mother gave her a fresh blue ballpoint pen, a pristine pad of white airmail paper that felt like tissue in her hand. She sat opposite Franny, reading an historical novel as Franny wrote, her feet swinging, hmmmhmmming in a way that would be annoying on a less brilliant child but only makes Franny’s mom love her more. Franny Baumgarten’s mother is drinking tea.)

“Chance of negative consequences related to number of drinks per week …” I have a 38.1 per cent chance of “negative consequences,” the kelly green spike, just slightly less ominous than those drinking fifty-one or more drinks per week. Their negative consequences are at 43.5 per cent. “Physical health, outlook on life, friends/social life …”

What do these brochure writers mean by this? Negative consequences?

I ponder the phrase
negative consequences
in the kitchen. I consider negative consequences as I open my cupboard and pour a vodka and tonic into a giant plastic cup decorated with a cartoon of Jackie Chan and the words
COMING
SOON – HI-YA
2! I imagine really drunk people sticking knives into toasters or running lawn mowers over their feet. Negative consequences, I think, fingering the pamphlet with one hand, drinking with the other. Flipping and sipping, I get to the final page. “
Your
choices about drinking.” A few options, with boxes to tick: “My drinking is fine for now.” “I will think about changing my drinking.” “I will reduce my drinking to a low-risk level.” “I will contact my local assessment and referral centre to find out about programs and groups that can help me.”

Me. Me. Me. All this first person – what to make of this? At the compound, Tree Ridington-Raymont’s mom made all the girls gather on the beach to welcome Tree’s period. I once had a teacher who told me a bottle cap was as worthy of study as a poem by Keats. “One plus one could be three,” she said. “Each to his – or her! – own.” Relative. Evaluation. Consequences. I wonder what these words mean to Franny Baumgarten.

I leave all the boxes blank.

F
OR THOSE NURSING HANGOVERS OF THE TINY-
quasimodoisringingabellinmyskull variety, there is nothing like an 8:00 a.m. screening of a three-hour wordless Russian/German/French co-production about Lenin. This is the film festival, and the idea of covering the film festival generates a strong response from Mohsen, who shouts after me as I leave his cab, “You have the best job in the world! Only in North America can you watch movies and get rich!”

Theo McArdle called last night to talk film festival, and we drank wine over the phone. He has booked several
afternoons off work and plans to go from theatre to theatre until he finds a single ticket available. Without knowing the name of the movie or the country that made it, he will just chow down: Korean, Indian, even British. He doesn’t care. He’s got the hunger. I did this before, when I was a waitress, a temp, a student. I did it because I cared about Soukorov’s mottled light and I liked the thawing boot smell of a winter movie theatre and I imagined some kind of small current running through the place, knitting together all the people inside, fraught and scared and laughing at the same thing.

After the
Saturday Night Fever
incident, Elaine made arrangements to have movies sent over from the mainland. Every Friday night at the island community centre, Elaine would thread the reels with her chewed fingernails. All the kiddie freaks sat upright, noses running and Salish sweaters touching, and for two solid hours there were no discussions about how we felt, no rap sessions, no consensus to be reached. Just Lauren Bacall’s tucked-in waist, her unmoving sheet of hair. Darth Vader ventilating. The Black Stallion rearing against his chains. The first moment, the moment the movie started, was like a bathtub filling in a silent room. The rush of drawing hot water, the ear-stuffing volume of it, and then the stopping, the silent space before the step inside.

But it’s not so much like that for critics. Critics go to press screenings in small rooms filled with other critics, cranky, caffeine-fed, light-starved, and tired. I feel sorry for the movies; surely their parents don’t know the bitter sitters with whom they’ve placed their babies.

Day Three of the film festival and I’ve slept through large segments of a Mexican film, a Czech film, and something animated and possibly Japanese that starred a large, lusty eggplant. I’ve attended a few cocktail receptions at random embassies – Oman has a film industry; who knew? – and Sunera and I have run into several accidental parties because every bar in the city is rented out for festival events. To leave your house is to wander into the mirth, like it or not. Mostly, it’s likeable.

Following the Taiwanese female ejaculation movie, I walk a few blocks to the press-only screening of a big American film, starring Nicole Kidman and a British guy. The theatre is much fuller than it was for the Japanese eggplant. I’m sitting near the Sludge Monster, the most mushroomy of all the critics, a man swear-to-God named Darcy Sludge who has been writing for the city’s lefty weekly since people got lefty. Without provocation, Sludge will tell you (and I don’t recommend provocation) how he knows Pauline Kael, and how he studied in Paris with André Bazin and he will tell you these facts, already unappetizing, as he unpacks a hot meal onto your armrest. Be it morning, noon, or night, the Sludge Monster carries with him a steaming Styrofoam-boxed feast in a padded blue sack. He opens it up, unleashing the stench of boiled meat. He ignores me, perhaps it’s the toque I have pulled down over my face, but proceeds to engage the gentleman to his left, Indie Magazine Guy (smudged black-rimmed glasses and the exhausted air of someone who stays up night after night clicking out unread editorials bemoaning the state of film subsidies) with his
analysis of a Dogme film: “It’s no Fassbinder!” He actually uses the phrase
mise en scène
. I pull the toque lower.

The American critics have descended on the city with loud voices and laminated press passes swinging from their necks, travelling in packs, joshing and waving at one another, and smiling smiling smiling. Behind me, three Americans have moved on from complaining about the weather and are complimenting Canadian shopping. “They have Restoration Hardware now. It’s so much easier than Cannes.”

“True. They have everything here.”

“Except J. Crew,” a woman with a southern drawl points out, correctly.

Sludge unleashes a cartoon trail of smoky tendrils from his vat of boiled meat that circle and drift across the screen, creating pretty shadows and nausea as the movie starts.

I stay fairly awake. It’s a period piece about a mother in a fog-shrouded estate and a death and it ends just as the Sludge Monster is licking at the corners of his empty container. The lights come on and volunteers with a nervous air of efficiency set up tables and chairs at the front of the theatre. A line of studio executives and publicists, shampooed and frowning, marches in from the sidelines. They’re blocking their prize, keeping it concealed until the last possible moment. Finally reaching the front of the theatre, the executive crowd breaks and scatters like Busby Berkeley chorus girls to reveal the sweet hidden centre: Nicole Kidman, the Director, and Another Guy. The audience applauds Canadianly, which is to say with both indifference and awe, and not for very long.

Nicole Kidman is wearing (I write this down) a red silk Chinese dress. She is tall, with wire-rimmed glasses, halfvamp, half-librarian (I write this down, too: I could use it!). She looks at her feet, at the table, at her hands, which shake lightly.

There are two kinds of press conference questions. The first is the starfucker question, which includes queries like: Why did you do this movie? How did you get in character? Where did the idea come from? Celebs listen to these questions, and like the cartoon about the dog who only hears its name when the sentence is, Why did you eat my Christmas turkey, Bobo?, what they hear is, How did you get to be so fabulous? And that’s the question they answer, tails wagging.

The second type of question happens only at film festivals. It’s the Sludgey,
mise en scène
, I studied with Andrew Sarris question. It involves words like
auteur
and inappropriate references to
Battleship Potemkin
, as in: My question is for Ron Howard. Were you purposely responding to the dystopic midnight fantasy of Agnes Varda when you made
Backdraft II?
The questions are usually delivered with a French or a Polish accent, and they make everyone feel better about their lives, especially the askers, though actors never answer those questions, deferring instead to the adored daddy figure, the director.

“It was a lot of fun making this movie. We were like a family,” says Nicole Kidman in a quaking Australian monotone with all the conviction of a fifth grader delivering a speech on ichthyology to her science class. “We all played practical jokes on each other. It was fun.”

Family. I click through the screen on my cellphone, reminding myself whose calls I haven’t returned. Elaine. My dad. My dad in a tent in Arizona.

A moustachioed little man who smells of saltwater cologne is sitting next to me fighting with his digital recorder. “Fuckity fuck,” he repeats, pressing buttons, holding the box up to his ear, frantically shaking it so hard his isosceles elbow pokes in and out of my arm. On my other side, a handsome, greying woman in a black turtleneck exactly like mine is nodding beneath headphones, listening to the translation: I hear Nicole Kidman murmuring, “Just like a family … really good time …” Then Italian: “Bueno … familia …” The seats are too close together. Her headphones nearly brush my cheek, and the man continues shaking the recorder like a maraca: “Fuckity fuck.” He’s sweating now, sweat mixing with the aftershave; a scent like tidal pools. The woman is nodding, listening hard: “Bueno … bueno.” I think, I could be her in twenty years.

My mind drifts. I feel a guilt twitch over the unreturned phone calls. How could I call my dad back? What could I possibly tell him about all of this?

I look at Nicole Kidman and I realize I know more about her life right now than I do about my father’s. But I only know the details, the breakups and the box-office figures: names, dates, and injuries. These are the boundaries of my job, and they’re closing in. My palms moisten. My shoulders shudder. I look at my right hand; it’s in the air. Somehow, I can’t help it; the hand doesn’t care about professional repercussions. It waves frantically.

I need to know something.

“Lady in black,” says the Czar. Most women in the room answer to that description, but he means me. I stand up, my heart racing a little under the collective sweep of eyes. The notebook paper clots in my palm.

“My question is for Nicole Kidman,” I say.

“Speak up, please,” says the Czar.

“My question is for Nicole Kidman,” I shout. I clear my throat. “What’s it like?”

The Czar gives Ms. Kidman a quick, apologetic glance that she doesn’t catch, plucking at her water glass with her bony fingers. “Can you clarify your question, please?” asks the Czar.

“What’s it like?” I’m just going for it now, just letting it all out. “I mean, when everyone thinks your husband is gay, and then he leaves you, and you’re a billionaire and not untalented but in a business where talent doesn’t really matter and, and, you had a miscarriage that we all know about.” The strangeness of this strikes me suddenly and I say it again, “Somehow we all know about that. Every single person in this room knows and, you, and you have children, right? You have two children?”

Nicole Kidman looks up, straight at me, unsmiling, her white skin reflecting the lights of the cameras that line the sides of the theatre.

“My question is, What’s it like to be you?” It’s a bad question. I recognize it as such even without the Sludge Monster’s little choking sounds. But it occurs to me that that’s my problem; I don’t know what it’s like to be anyone else. I can’t
imagine any other life but this one. I’m being stabbed to death by my point of view. Does anyone else ever feel like that? So desperate to break your own borders, so frantic you want to smash through someone else’s stomach and crawl in? Maybe Nicole Kidman knows something about this; a person who walks in other people’s bodies for a living must, surely?

Did I just say that out loud?

I sit down.

The room is very, very quiet. The Czar whispers something in Nicole Kidman’s ear and she shakes her head. The Italian woman moves ever so slightly away from me. Nicole Kidman leans forward, mouth over the microphone. In a girlish Australian voice, she says softly, “It’s probably not that different from being you.”

I doubt that, but I write it down anyway.

“Next question!”

The Royal Ontario Museum needs cash, it seems. Otherwise, why would hundreds of publicists, journalists, film buyers, and even one or two actual filmmakers be allowed to mingle with the Egyptian mummies, resting empty crantinis next to displays of Roman glass
circa
870?